President Trump dreaded facing his wife after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about groping women without their consent, according to a new book about the first lady.
After watching the tape with members of his campaign at their offices in Trump Tower in October 2016, the soon-to-be president was urged to talk with his wife, according to The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump by Mary Jordan.
“Everybody was saying, ‘You should go upstairs and see Melania. Why don’t you go upstairs now and see Melania?’ And he was not rushing to go up there,” former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told Jordan. “I said to him, ‘It ain’t going to get any easier. The longer you wait, it’s not going to get any easier.'”
Another person in the room said, “That night he seemed frightened to go face his wife.”
Trump finally went to talk with his wife two hours later.
“Melania does not yell or throw lamps. She shows her fury quietly and deliberately,” Jordan writes.
The future first lady, who was one of the few people around Trump who believed he could win the election, warned her husband that his behavior could sink his campaign.
“Now you could lose,” she said. “You could have blown this for us.”
She refused to appear with her husband but later released a statement calling her husband’s comments “unacceptable and offensive.”
“This could have been a lot worse,” Trump said after reading his wife’s statement before its release.
[Read more: Melania Trump renegotiated prenup before moving to White House: Book]
Another book published last year about the first lady said she was “livid” about Trump’s comments caught on a hot mic.
“By this point in her marriage, she was less concerned that her husband had an imperfect track record of fidelity and more worried the stories of his behavior, like this one, would get out. She was also furious that all she had sacrificed — her privacy, her schedule, time with Barron, her dignity following the leak of old nude photos, and the RNC speech debacle — would now possibly be for nothing. Some dumb, disgusting conversation would take it all down,” author Kate Bennett wrote in Free, Melania.
The East Wing has dismissed Jordan’s book, which is set to be released Tuesday, as fiction.
“Yet another book about Mrs. Trump with false information and sources. This book belongs in the fiction genre,” the first lady’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement to the Washington Examiner on Friday.
[Read more: ‘Faith and religious devotion’: Melania author says first lady unlikely to divorce Trump]
